A Survey on Trapping Sets and Stopping Sets

LDPC codes are used in many applications, however, their error correcting capabilities are limited by the presence of stopping sets and trapping sets. Trapping sets and stopping sets occur when specific low-wiehgt error patterns cause a decoder to fail. Trapping sets were first discovered with investigation of the error floor of the Margulis code. Possible solutions are constructions which avoid creating trapping sets, such as progressive edge growth (PEG), or methods which remove trapping sets from existing constructions, such as graph covers. This survey examines trapping sets and stopping sets in LDPC codes over channels such as BSC, BEC and AWGNC.